Planting potatoes is fun and satisfying, producing a buried crop that sometimes pops out two or even three seasons later.
Picking out potato seeds at Guy’s Farm and Yard means choosing seed potatoes with eyes on two sides. This year’s varieties are Yukon Gold, Russet Burbank, and the wonderfully psychedelic sounding Organic Magic Molly purple potatoes. Gardeners cut each one in half, making sure there are eyes on each half for the plants to grow from.
Prepping the bed meant digging out these volunteer elephant garlic bubs. (The intended E-garlic crop is growing elsewhere.) Elephant garlic is closer to a leek, tender and tasty whether used raw on a salad, added to casseroles and other dishes, or lightly sautéed.
Gardeners dug six trenches for the potato seed in a bed growing other crops for a tasty stew or veggie roast.
Atop a bit of compost, the seeds go in 18 inches apart. Potato plants spread out.
The potatoes are topped with more compost, then a thick layer of leaf mulch.
After planting potatoes in these six furrows and four wooden boxes, there was so much potato seed left over that gardeners headed outside the garden fence. At the downhill end of the garden waste windrow, the soil is rich with nutrients. We share this land with many deer, woodchucks, and other wildlife. Fencing is essential, so they repurposed an old wire cage that had protected a young pussy willow and dug a round bed.
This spiral maximizes the small space. There isn’t anything like 18 inches between each seed. That’s a garden experiment for you! When placing seed after seed gets old, best to make a game of it.
Leaf mulch tops the potato spiral. When gardeners see potato leaves peeking through, it’s time to add more compost and another thick layer of leaves.
That business about potato gifts years later? A gardener broadforked one of this season’s onion beds and scored these potatoes that had grown there two or three years earlier. The same will happen with this season’s potato beds: A year or more from now, when no one is thinking of potatoes, there they’ll be, just as delicious.
